D&D (2024) Githzerai Psion? Thri-kreen Psion? Where's My Psion?

[Paul Farquhar]

Considering I discovered that a LOT of people in my age cohort had no idea who Kendrick Lamar was last night, yea, I would say that a lot of people stop keepng up once they hit their 30s or so.

Who?

 

[TwoSix]

Well, I like lots of classes and the Great Wheel, but I'm funny that way .

Sure, plenty of people can appreciate both simplicity and complexity. I like the class system in the Without Number systems, for example, which has both simplicity (only 3 or 4 classes, depending on if you view the multiclass as a class) but also complexity (a lot of partial classes that modify how characters are built).

 

[TwoSix]

Who?

I let it slide for the non-Americans.

 

[Steampunkette]

I don't have objective answers, and it's constantly a case of playing catch up because it changes so fast, but my job certainly positions me to make observations. But frankly, I'm most amazed at just how badly out of touch people on these forums are. Does no one talk to kids? Does no one look at what books people are reading on the train, or are prominently displayed at the station book counter? Does no one play D&D with people who are 30 years younger than them? I have noticed people stating to cotton on to Romantasy, but that's a couple of years old. The current big thing is The Fourth Wing, which is currently on it's third book.

Paul's right!

No one under 40 reads comic books or watches movies with superheroes that have psychic powers. Or enjoys Star Wars. Or have ever heard of Carrie. Or Minority Report. None of them read Matilda. Or the dozens of fantasy, romance, and horror novels about characters with psychic abilities released in the past 20 years. And none of them have even -heard- of palm readers or psychic crystals that you wear to deflect or absorb bad vibes. That's pure nonsense!

Kids just have no idea what Psychics or Psionics are! It's totally foreign to their entire experience and certainly not something they would EVER want to explore in a TTRPG.

ESPECIALLY the Nerdy Kids who invest themselves into the kind of culture that surrounds the TTRPG space. Nope! Never.

(This may be your anecdotal experience blinding you to a larger trend. Particularly since your specific type of fantasy explicitly does not include Psionics that you teach your younger players about while other people do expose their younger players to Psionics as a concept, if not a class)

It certainly can (and must) keep up with the current decade. The development cycle for a D&D book is about two and a half years. But good designers try to anticipate future trends, not follow them.

This is... an interesting take.

Good designers don't try to anticipate trends. Good designers try to make mechanics and systems which are intuitive and interesting while supporting the fantasy the designer thinks is under-served. Whether under-served by the mechanics that exist or lack of exposure.

Forward-Thinking designers look at what people like and want, now, look at what's on the market, now, and either iterate what's on the market to be closer to what people like and want, now, or create something that fills a hole in the market. Sometimes they're also Good Designers.

Not always.

 

[Minigiant]

No one sat down and said "you know what we really need? A class than can infuse items!" The said "we want an artificer class (especially because Eberron). What gimmick can we come up with to try and make it not identical to existing classes?" And they went through several different versions, including pet class at one time, before they got to the one that stuck.

Other way around

Can the artificer be a rogue subclass?
No
Make it a class.

Can the soul knife be a rogue subclass?
Yes
It's a subclass.

Can the Psion be a wizard subclass?
No

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Or enjoys Star Wars.

Hah. Kids know about The Force. And this has largely replaced ideas about space magic from the 1960s and 70s in pop culture, just like Tolkien's goblins displaced Christiana Rossetti's goblins.

If you want to bring back the old style, you need to be prepared to explain it, and make it shiny for a new audience, many of whom are not hardcore geeks who read retro sci fi (or just aim for a very small market).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Other way around

Can the artificer be a rogue subclass?
No
Make it a class.

I'm pretty sure I could do artificer as a rogue subclass.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm pretty sure I could do artificer as a rogue subclass.

It's not if you can physically do it

It's if the customer base would accept what you make.

WOTC tried to put classes in the wizard as subclasses and got booed out the building.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Fair. I also lean towards the maximalist camp; for fantasy games, I prefer class approaches like Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard, where there are dozens of class options that open up during the leveling process, or Fabula Ultima, where there are a dozen classes but multiclassing is required.

I think to make psionics work for a class minimalist, it requires a change to the underpinnings of the cosmology, such that psychic powers have a home akin to divine or arcane powers. Class minimalists, to me, shares some aesthetic preferences with Great Wheel devotees; there's an appreciation for symmetry and a desire to have everything fit into a certain place. Class maximalism is more akin to the World Axis, there can be as many classes as there are domains in the Astral, each one telling its own particular story.

The irony here is that the Great Wheel is absolutely cosmological maximalism. Utterly overgrown with planes, and very much gets (and, I would argue, deserves) the kind of "grid-filling"/"box-ticking" accusations that class maximalists often hear from class minimalists. Conversely, the World Axis is almost a study in minimalism as far as D&D cosmologies go. Five planes: Prime, Shadow, Fey, Divine, Elemental. Maybe a sixth via the Far Realm, but I find that is less a plane and more an explanation (that is, nobody ever "goes" there, it's not really a place, it's just the Weird Space Whence Nasty Things Come.)

So it is kinda funny, but I agree with you, this is a pattern I've seen.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hah. Kids know about The Force. And this has largely replaced ideas about space magic from the 1960s and 70s in pop culture, just like Tolkien's goblins displaced Christiana Rossetti's goblins.

If you want to bring back the old style, you need to be prepared to explain it, and make it shiny for a new audience, many of whom are not hardcore geeks who read retro sci fi (or just aim for a very small market).

I am truly amazed at how you can be simultaneously advocating for nearly up-to-the-minute, bleeding-edge familiarity with what modern-generation players want, and yet also so incredibly dismissive of young people. "Make it shiny"? Really?

I'm pretty sure I could do artificer as a rogue subclass.

I'm pretty sure you could do every class in 5e as a subclass of an "Adventurer" class.

I'm also pretty sure the D&D fanbase would metaphorically riot.

Whether it is physically possible to do is not the operative question. The operative question whether it is wise or fitting or productive to do. And both WotC's own data (what little they deign to share) and evidence from the wider world, anecdotal or otherwise, strongly indicates that this isn't wise, fitting, or productive.